Choose the Best Dating Website for You

Like it or not, dating has gone digital. Twelve million people in the United States used over 100 online dating websites in 2008, and those numbers are only growing: Industry analysts expect that the Internet dating service market will grow from $900 million a year in consumer spending in 2007 to $1.9 billion in 2012.

Even more promising? It's not just a money pit. An online survey of 7000 recently married people found that 17 percent of respondents met their spouses online. And another survey of 1,500 unmarried people in committed relationships found 20 percent had met their current girlfriend or boyfriend online.

If you've already committed to a dating website, be sure to check out our online dating pointers for tips on how to improve your odds. But if you're still new to the game, be forewarned that not all sites are created equal—some are free, some are for religious purposes, and some are downright sleazy.

That's why we signed up for 8 of the most talked-about dating websites in the market and did the heavy lifting, soul searching, and message fielding—so you don't have to. Read on to see which service meets your dating needs the best. It's the first step to maximizing your chances at finding love.

Chemistry.com Chemistry.com is a "sister site" to Match.com. What sets it apart is its hyper-intense science-based matching algorithm, designed by Helen Fisher, Ph.D., a biological anthropologist and the site's chief scientific advisor. Based on your answers, chemistry.com gives you a personality title—for example, Director, Negotiator, Builder, Explorer—and from there, you're matched with others who should be good matches, based on scientific research.

Based on my unprofessional opinion, this is the most valuable personality test of all the dating websites. Boy, what an effort, but it is worth it.

Best for: Singles over 35, and those who care deeply about relationship science. Additionally, Chemistry.com seems to be positioning itself as an attractive alternative to those rejected by eHarmony.com—typically, those interested in same-sex relationships. EHarmony does not match same-sex couples, but in February 2010, chemistry.com celebrated Telluride's Gay Ski Week.

Question philosophy: The questionnaire takes upwards of an hour to complete, and asks you confusing, multiple-choice, and occasionally repetitive questions about your level of adventurousness or your need for space. Some questions are even stranger—for instance, men are shown four pictures of hands, and asked to tell which one looks most like their own. The reason is tricky—relative finger length has been linked to testosterone exposure in the womb. (It's a scientific way of asking if you're aggressive.)

User base: From the About Us page: "Take the test that over 8,000,000 people worldwide have already taken." Of course, this doesn't mean all of those singles are active members . . .

Date began: 2006

Cost: 1 month: $49.95 3 months: $33.32/month 6 months: $26.65/month

Like most other sites, you can sign up for free and have access to basic services—receive a personality review, view photos and profiles, and receive personalized matches. However, to communicate with these matches—or to see who's been looking at your profile—you need to sign up.

eHarmony.com EHarmony.com depends heavily on its matching system, which is constantly revised by a team of scientists. They rely so heavily on this system, in fact, that there is no search function on the site. You may not message any user deemed incompatible by the algorithm. Until recently, you couldn't even see the pictures of those with whom you did match. The greatest benefit to this pay-only service is the corollary to these perceived flaws: They do all the work for you (and you can just about trust they've done their work correctly).

Best for: Heterosexual people looking for marriage or serious relationships.

Question philosophy: Users must endure a questionnaire that takes the longest of all the sites—over an hour—and asks a range of questions that include everything from what your partner ethnicity preferences are to how much money you make. In the end, you can be rejected without explanation.

Side note: This author has been rejected, twice. And so has our Girl Next Door.

User base: About 20 million. About 15,000 people fill out the survey every day.

Date began: 2000

Cost: Because I was deemed unsuitable for any of eHarmony's matches, I could not verify the cost of admission—but, according to About.com, it's one of the highest of all major dating sites.

JDate.com JDate.com is known for catering specifically to people of Jewish faith or heritage looking for love, but it isn't exclusive to Jewish members. It doesn't have a very extensive matching algorithm, but it does have a loyal following.

Best for: People of the Jewish faith or of Jewish heritage, or those seeking a Jewish mate, typically for long-term, serious relationships.

Question philosophy: The matching algorithm is limited to questions about religious practices and beliefs and ethnicity. The rest is left up to you to describe yourself freely. As such, the only criteria by which you can match yourself with singles is through religion, and from that cipher you can sift through profiles, one by one, for the personalized essay-style information.

User base: JDate lets you see how many members are online. At any given time you might see 12,000-15,000 members.

Date began: 1997

Cost: The free sign-up allows you to post a profile, search for members, reply to instant messages, send (but not receive) a variety of "flirts" (like the myriad of "pokes" that Facebook offers)—and (bonus!) lets you see who has looked at your profile.

The premium service has more options for communication: email, chat, and an internal instant messaging service. It also includes the ability to highlight your profile (further customization for eye-catching ability) and features you more often as a match for other members.

Lavalife.com Lavalife.com allows you to post three different profiles at one time, answering different questions for each of them. How is this useful? Lavalife has three different sections: Dating, Relationships, and Intimate Encounters. You are allowed full anonymity to pursue who you want, how you want. From a features standpoint, this website blows the others out of the water. They offer a huge slew of communication options, including chat and instant messaging, e-mail, smiles, sharing of private photo galleries, video greetings, and phone calls made through the site.

For the sheer variety of interaction possibilities, from different profiles, in different sections, across different platforms and mediums, this website is a panoply of discussion. It is almost impossible not to get your message across to whomever you want it to reach.

Best for: Anyone willing to pay for a huge range of features or anyone who wants more than one type of relationship to pursue.

Question philosophy: For the free signup (the first step) there's only the nitty-gritty (height, body type, ethnicity, religion, smoking habits and drinking habits, and so on). But, as mentioned above, you're allowed to create three separate profiles and answer questions differently for each based on your intentions.

User base: There's speculation that the site hosts over 5 million users.

Date began: 1987

Cost: 1 month: $34.99/mo 3 months: $18.99/mo

Match.com Match.com is the first, largest, and most global dating website. The primary means of communication are e-mail, wink, and call. The call feature is unique to Match: It allows users to call one another using dummy numbers on their real telephones. When you don't want someone to call you anymore, you simply remove her from your phone book. Also notable: Match is one of the few cellphone-friendly dating sites. In case the date you're on isn't working out, you don't have to wait until you're home to check out other singles.

Best for: Those who are serious about online dating or who only want to browse but never actually connect. The free site allows you to look at others' pictures and wink, but it doesn't offer a message center or mailbox. In short, it's not worth it for those who don't pay, especially when there are so many more comprehensive free sites available.

Question philosophy: Match asks basic lifestyle compatibility questions: what you look like, what movies, music, and books you enjoy, your religious and educational background, your occupation (and income), and your ethnicity. This allows users to discriminate their matches based on hyper-specific and self-selected criteria: If you only wanted hazel-eyed, Middle Eastern Christians, for instance, so be it!

User base: Projections put this population at over 20 million. However, recent figures show that there are only about 1.35 million paying subscribers, which means that many of the "matches" suggested might not be people who can read or reply to your messages. In fact, a recent complaint filed in the US District Court, Southern District of New York, read: "Match misleads paying subscribers by charging them for the ability to write e-mails to members who can't reply to their e-mails or even read them." Not exactly a glowing review.

Date began: April 1995

Cost: 1 month: $39.99 3 months: $22.99/month

There are two options for the 6-month plan: $19.99/month and $20.99/month. For the extra dollar, you can receive notifications that your email was read, your profile will show up more often in matches, and your profile gets some nice customizable features to help it stand out (like colorized banners).

OkCupid.com OkCupid.com is almost entirely free, with a small cost for luxury options, like a specialty search mechanism and removal of ads. The site employs a mathematical algorithm based on your answers to a series of questions, and based on that algorithm they tell you what percentage match, friend, and enemy you are with any given user. The most stand-out feature for the site is the staff blog. The blog posts analyze their massive user base and provide extremely helpful tips for how to increase your odds at online dating. Recently they even began offering a service called MyBestFace, which analyzes the pictures you have posted and tells you which one will generate the most responses.

Best for: Anyone looking for best value, transparency, and extremely tailored search capabilities.

Question philosophy: While there is a general set of staff questions that you must answer to complete your profile, the most interesting aspect of OkCupid is its Web2.0 approach to compatibility: Staff questions establish the basics (who are you physically, mentally, and emotionally, and who are you looking for along those same criteria), but the user-generated questions provide answers that you personally care about. These range from the basic informational, "Are you vegan, vegetarian, or meat-eater?" to the strange hypothetical, "Imagine that your significant other has a fantasy that cannot be fulfilled with you for anatomical reasons. Would you encourage them to go elsewhere to fulfill it if it involved sex with another?" Moreover, you can rate the importance of how your matches answer any given question: You can say that you are vegan, but that you care minimally whether your partner eats meat, for instance.

User base: A little over 1.2 million.

Date began: 2004

Cost: Free

PlentyOfFish.com Almost every compilation of dating websites includes plentyoffish.com (or POF, as it is referred to in its forums). Notable features include the heavily-trafficked forums, the usual compatibility questionnaires, and the rarely free, much-loved "Who's Seen Me" button. A New York Times article extolling the site said the look and feel of the site, ". . . has some unfinished patches and irritating quirks and seems to come from the Anti-Perfectionist School of Design." The same article describes spending time on the website as "a visually painful experience" thanks mostly to problems with site organization, picture sizing and resolution.

Best for: Anyone who is looking for a cheap fix—think of this site as the MySpace to OkCupid's Facebook. It's definitely one of the best deals on the Internet, with free access to such a large and bustling community—but the website is not for anyone who cares about site design.

Question philosophy: PlentyOfFish has a matching system that is based on questions designed to measure five broad categories that impact compatibility: self-confidence, family orientation, self-control, openness, and how easygoing you are. As the disclaimers preceding your personalized results point out, it's not that you need to score "high" in each category. (By the way, it's worth joining this free site just for the personality test and insight into your compatibility profile.) The site emphasizes chemistry between profiles "based on decades of empirical research in the social sciences."

User base: About 600,000, with older, inactive accounts purged every few months.

Date began: 2003

Cost: Free

True.com True.com's purpose is to provide a safe online environment, so it conducts background checks on all its users, focusing on criminal records and whether or not you are married and trying to use the site for affairs. For example, by checking against a criminal database, any user who has a U.S. felony or sexual offense conviction is prevented from communicating with other members.

Best for: People who want to know what they are getting into. This includes the cautious as well as the paranoid.

Question philosophy: Whatever the question, you'd better answer honestly. They are known for prosecuting people who misrepresent themselves under the pretense that doing so constitutes wire fraud. Compared to "Are you a convicted sex offender?" questions like, "What do you like to do in your free time?" seem out of place. However, the site does set itself apart (for better or worse) thanks to its ubiquitously risqué advertising on social sites like MySpace ("It's nice to be naughty") and its equally charged quizzes on sex, sexuality, and sexual preferences.

User base: An independent analysis form the New York Times estimates 3.8 million unique visits per month, and the founder, Herb Vest, claims 16 million use the site.

Date began: 2003

Cost: Joining is free, but it only allows you to see what you're missing. If you want to communicate with others, you'll have to pay.

1 month: $49.99 3 months: $79.99 6 months: $129.99

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